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> I believe that, at age 18, women have more sophisticated social lives I think you are on to something. This is really the critical age when the decision happ
by corpMaverick 9y ago
> I believe that, at age 18, women have more sophisticated social lives
I think you are on to something. This is really the critical age when the decision happens. Everything else is the just the result of this.
My own theory, is that CS (programming) is perceived as having low social status. Women are socially smarter, so they are aware of that. Men are clueless, so they are more likely to choose programming and later they move into other CS fields.
- bluthru 9y ago>Women are socially smarter What does this mean? Do women talk more? Yes. Is it substantive? Women are more willing to talk about their feelings but they also can be quite indirect compared to a man. Women also have a reputation of being more adversarial and catty: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/opinion/sunday/why-women-compete-with-each-other.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/opinion/sunday/why-women-...
- door2 9y agoYou’re a misogynist
- bluthru 9y agoThe parent above me said "Women are socially smarter, so they are aware of that. Men are clueless" and I didn't resort to calling them a misandrist. Let's stick to talking about the issue at hand.
- door2 9y agoYou called women catty. That’s straight up misogyny. I don’t know what else you want me to say.
- bluthru 9y agoDescribing a gender with a negative adjective is never ok? Is it wrong to call men "clueless"?
- door2 9y agoIt’s not the same. If women and men held totally equal power in society, it would be the same, but they don’t. Attacking women in tech as a group is punching down, attacking men (at least for their rampant horrible and sexist behavior) is punching up. In terms of gender relations, men are absolutely, in general, and especially in tech, totally clueless.
- bluthru 9y agoSaying that you can't criticize a group because of its amount of power in a society is a completely arbitrary rule that is easily disregarded. You will never be able to shame people into following that nonsense.
- dang 9y agoYou appear to still be using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's an abuse of this site because it destroys the intellectual curiosity that HN exists for. As I've explained to you before, we ban accounts that do this, regardless of which ideology they favor. This is in the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, so we ban accounts that do it. If anyone wants to understand how we interpret this rule, the key word is 'primarily' and I've posted about it a lot: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20primarily https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... I don't think you're abusing HN on purpose, but we've given you multiple warnings already. When people either can't or won't use the site as intended, we do end up banning them.
- bluthru 9y ago
- Raphmedia 9y agoSocially smarter doesn't mean better social skills. It simply means that they are more socially aware. If you allow the metaphor, I would say that they are more likely to "play the game" and "play it well" at that. Social skills have very little relationship to "emotional intelligence", so I have no clue why you would bring up the point that women are more willing to talk about their feelings. You are comparing extraversion and agreeableness. While both are statistically higher in women, you are comparing apples and oranges. Here, have some science: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/
- bluthru 9y agoThanks for the link. >Replicating previous findings, women reported higher Big Five Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism scores than men. Isn't this basically what got James Damore fired? Heh.
- Raphmedia 9y agoHe worded it in a socially unaware way. If he ranked higher in Agreeableness, he would likely have found a way to communicate the information without getting fired.
- bluthru 9y ago>He worded it in a socially unaware way. I don't think so: "Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance). This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs." Maybe if women were more agreeable they wouldn't have been so offended.
- Raphmedia 9y agoAgreeableness trumps Neuroticism IMHO. Neuroticism is a knee-jerk reaction that you cannot control without a lot of self-control. To expect an individual ranking high in Neuroticism to control themselves is to be blind to other's points of view. In short, it means that you do not have enough sensibility to understand and predict the reaction of others before they happen. Agreeableness allows you to predict those reaction and plan accordingly.
- icefox 9y ago> My own theory, is that CS (programming) is perceived as having low social status. A colleague told me when out at a bar he refrains from telling women that he is a programmer because they suddenly become way more interested because they know how much $$$ programming jobs bring in. That does not sound like low social status signalling to me, but the opposite at least for males.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- teddyh 9y agoHaving a high income gives a high status to men, but not to women. Women are not at all judged by their income like men are. Therefore, the fact that programmers make money attracts men to being programmers, but does not attract women.